If you insist on keeping all your customers’ insights trapped in the CRM cage, you are most probably letting your competitors play with advantage, because they are certainly unlocking their core data. I just hope that you take the wake-up call soon enough, before it’s too late. Even or better said especially for data exploitation initiatives there’s an opportunity window you don’t want to miss.

What’s so special in your CRM data records?

A couple of things: firstly, they are probably unique… and you need to leverage this source to boost your business. Secondly, your CRM data is the DNA of your business. A business is as good as its customers… no customers, no business. Thirdly, nowhere but here you can understand what made arbitrary people become your customers and what’s making your customers not to churn to a competitor, which is the essence of any business. In other words, understanding which promises your marketing machinery made about your services or your products, understanding where you are risking not to keep up with them, understanding what’s out there that’s changing your customers’ minds even though you are keeping your promises, etc.
Behind the world “relevance” hides a brand new marketing approach in contraposition to traditional gun-shooting practices, which consists of finding out what’s relevant for a potential buyer and pressing this key over and over… Sadly, the “relevance” piece, so important in the acquisition phase, starts loosing significance right after the contract signature or purchase. Has ever anyone thought of why a product or a services contracted by an existing customer is still relevant? In your CRM you’ll find many indicators to give answer to this question… Can you imagine a system predicting for a particular customer the proneness to churn? Actually having it in place is nowadays one of the basics.

But what’s all in there? Depending on the level of maturity and sophistication, besides the standard information like demographics or home address, a modern CRM keeps track of each and every outbound and inbound communication or interaction between the customer and the product selling company. Additionally, the complete list of incidences that happened to the customer using the product (example: a DSL provider should have a detailed list of outages per customer, no matter if the customer ended up phoning the call center to complain).
Advanced CRMs support social capabilities as well: the traditional KPIs to measure the value of a customer, like ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), can be weighted by the social influence of a given user: alpha user, opinion leader, etc, by the size of her social network and by her activity index. If an alpha customer churns, the probability of churning in her influence circle increases drastically.

This kind of analysis enters the realm of traditional Business Intelligence and is a must-do-to-survive for all kinds of companies… But if what you plan to do is creating a Big Data product leveraging customer related information, there are 2 mandatory steps to be done: remove all personal identifiable information (PII) from the records and aggregate up to a level where the non-disclosure principle can be ensured. If the customer has given his permission (opt-in or not opt-put depending on the implementation)